Talk:Prepaid SIM with data
Use this page to discuss design and content changes to the 'main page. For general wiki discussion, please visit the '''Community Portal or Forums.'' France beyond Android and iPhone I'd love to see, and eventually could contribute to, information about phones and data in France. Doc Searls has begun with a post on his site, before his trip. He has links to Telestial and Cellular Abroad His post is here. Data I seek: Is it better to buy an unlocked 3G iPhone in the states and send it with a study abroad student, or have the student buy a local phone (what kind?) when the student arrives in France? The latter choice so far has been most recommended. And what about data and wifi in the provinces, particularly Montpellier? Akrewson 18:55, July 25, 2010 (UTC)akrewson Pointless regions I have removed the regions from the list of countries for the following reasons: #Sub-dividing by region adds no value, only disadvantages. #When the list of countries is sub-divided into regions, one first has to look up the region and then the country. This unnecessarily turns it into a two-stage process, which slows it down. #The name of the region might not be what the user expects. The user might expect names of continents (e.g. North America, South America etc), whereas Middle East and America might not be what the user expects. This again slows down finding a country. #Some countries are in more than one continent, e.g. Russia, Turkey, Kazakhstan. #Some countries are in different continents depending on whose definition you use, e.g. Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan. #The list of countries fits perfectly on one screen, so there is no layout-related reason to divide countries into regions. #The layout of countries by region at http://www.prepaidgsm.net/en/operators.php is not a good example to follow because the countries do not all fit on one screen. NFH (talk) 17:39, June 9, 2015 (UTC) Why the order of the list according to region makes sense: I totally disagree to this point of view. We have now 80+ countries and will be at 100+ soon. To break them down in one long list lacks clearity, especially as some specific countries are harder to find now. 1.) Subdividing a list of 80 entries may make sense, because it's simply long. For instance, I edited many countries that were a mess. Most of all, they lacked structure. Take for example France: You can sort the operators somehow or make one long list. 2.) I agree that first you had to look at the region and than at the country. But users who look for a specific country mostly come from Google linking directly to the country site according to wikia staff. There are other users who want to look for an area or region too. Not everybody is on a country-specific search. For instance, many Americans look for an European SIM for their "Europe in one week" trip. 3.) The name according to region was set according to Wikipedia. The division of the world in different regions: America, Europa, Africa, Middle East, Asia and Oceania is well established and recognized all over the world. Dividing it by continents is tricky, as most people say that e.g. America is ONE continent, not two or three. Wikipedia uses the same order when it list the mobile operators according to region: for Europe or for the Americas 4.) There are some countries spanning more than one region, but it's generally approved that Russia belongs to the European Region and Turkey to this too. Generally, there are no big discussions internationally in which region a country wants to be listed. 5.) To avoid any political discussion, the countries and their names were all revised according to Wikipedia. So the "Russian Federation" (as it was called here a year ago) is now again "Russia" and disputed areas are categorized according to international (UN) categories. That's why e.g. Transistria is in the Moldava chapter and a reference to Crimea is only made in the Ukraine chapter. 6.) The list fits or fits not on the screen. That depends totally on your screen and the editor. On mobile screens, the list is one long collumn, on larger screens it depends very much on their size. It is not essential to have all names on the screen alltogether. Your demand of fitting it to screen, actually prohibits new countries to be added. So please explain to the people of Algeria or Belize why their country must no be added. 7.) Now we have much more problems: Because, the list is already structured. All Countries is at the beginning, which sort of mandatory. In alpha order, Albania would have been first on the list. So it's not unstructured. If you structure the beginning of the list, why not the rest? 8.) Take for example this problem: I want to add the French islands of the Caribbean. That's Guadeloupe, Martinique, Suriname and a few other small islands. They all have the same three operators. But how should this be called? I planned the name "French Caribbean", but it is not an official name. These areas are overseas departments of France. Nobody will look for them at France. But "French Caribbean" can be only found, when there is some regional reference. Now, the only way to link this article is to put all names in the list and link it to the same article. 10.) I tried to make the title page clearer by giving it more structure. It was a pretty mess one year ago. No graphical elements....not structure at all. This was given to me as a task from the WIKI team. We have now many more hits. I really don't understand why people are trying to spend their time destroying structure, instead of improving this WIKI. 11.) I will leave it as it is now. By adding new countries, this will blow up considerably as Guadeloupe, Martinique (for French Carribbean) or Guernsey, Jersey (for the Channel Islands) now need each to have a special quotation on the list, as without a regional reference, people will not have a chance to find it. 12.) Please improve this WIKI, don't distroy structures. Generally, compared to other WIKIs, it still needs more not less structure. Wolfbln (talk) 19:49, June 9, 2015 (UTC) : Most of your argument focuses on the concept of "structure". Where the "structure" makes things more complicated, whereby there are six lists of countries instead of one, the structure is deficient. It is much simpler to have just one alphabetical list. The length of the list does not present any difficulty for the user; nor does it create a mess. : You also make a good point about the French West Indies and I agree with your suggestion. We can smply list each of the component départements as a country (like Hong Kong, Jersey, Gibraltar and French Polynesia are) and simply divert each of them to the same page titled "French West Indies" (which is an established collective term). This will cause France, French Polynesia and French West Indies to appear together alphabetically. Problem solved. NFH (talk) 17:04, June 10, 2015 (UTC) I have created the New Caledonia page and it should really be added to the list of countries 03:55, January 31, 2016 (UTC) Cubacel/ETECSA? I miss Cuba at Prepaid list. Ok, they have some crap internet package to locals and foreigners, but I think it worth to put on the list, since the tourism to the island is growing up every year, since the "soft-clearance" for business by UN. ---- Hi Kerberos. I'm just preparing an own article for Cuba and Cubacel/ETECSA. This was not possible before as this country is on our Blacklist. You simply can't buy a prepaid SIM card as a visitor and you will not have data on a Cubacel SIM. This hasn't changed. But there are some other ways to get connected in this country. Give me some days for the article. Up to now we couldn't add blacklisted countries to our general list, as it was considered a whitelist. Now I changed it to a general list of countries and it's possible from now on. Stay tuned as I want to give the whole picture of the island and all the 3 choices you've got: renting a Cubacel SIM without data, staying on roaming of your home provider and buying NAUTA vouchers for public WiFi hotspots. Wolfbln (talk) 06:14, July 18, 2016 (UTC) (admin) This page has stopped working on mobile devices This page has stopped working on mobile devices. Instead of displaying the content of the page, including the list of countries, it displays a thumbnail of 10 "trending" countries. At least this is what happens on an iPhone. How can we fix this? NFH (talk) 08:10, November 26, 2016 (UTC) Hi NFH. Thanks for bringing this to my attention. Some weeks it worked all right on the main page, now the main page in mobile version can't be linked directly to the desktop main page anymore without any change from our side. Fandom/Wikia has probably made some changes. I have the choice to "edit" the mobile main page, but only in a very basic way. I can add pics linked to pages, but there is no way to reestablish the former page as I see. So just to fix it temporarily - as more than 1/2 of our users are accessing it from mobile devices - I added a world map pic to be linked to a clone of the previous site. I don't find any other way to link it directly. This layout sucks. As I'm travelling right now, I have only limited ways to fix it. So it will be temporarily like this before I find a solution. Probably, as I've seen on other mobile main pages on this WIKI, we have to provide some pics linking to pages only. Any suggestions? Wolfbln (talk) 19:15, November 26, 2016 (UTC) (admin)